Crystal Leww: Cardi B is not a good rapper, and any criticism of her music will undoubtedly try to hit at her weakness in the “technical” department. But technical skills have always been overrated in music anyway. Continue reading “To watch it unfold (Cardi B)”
New York Times, Oct. 5, 1969
“The six tracks on the first side and the opening two tracks on the flip are all write-offs: there’s a Ringo Starr nursery rhyme; a quick burst of sub-Brian Wilson; two songs by George Harrison, mediocrity incarnate; yet another slice of Paul McCartney twenties nostalgia, and an endless slow blues.
“The badness ranges from mere gentle tedium to cringing embarrassment. The blues, for instance, is horribly out of tune, and Ringo’s ditty is purest Mickey Mouse. The only interesting failures are two numbers by John Lennon, ‘Come Together’ and ‘Oh! Darling.'”
(The latter is actually McCartney, but oh well.)
“Because it was endearing when I wanted to consume my boyfriend’s record collection at 15 and liked being quizzed on singles and trivia — but when I later covered music for years for the alt-weekly in Nashville at 28 as the local rock scene there simmered up, I got an unending stream of shit for daring to write like I thought I had something to say that mattered in the slightest. (Yes, this is true in many ways for any woman who writes anything on the Internet, but especially in male dominated fields.)”
– Tracy Moore, Oh, the Unbelievable Shit You Get Writing About Music as a Woman (Jezebel)
– A lot of good stuff in this firecracker of an essay, which summarizes and spits out an online fracas last week regarding the blog, My Husband’s Stupid Record Collection.
Well, sort of.
Rolling Stone’s 500 Worst Reviews of All Time, a “work in progress” by someone named “schmidtt,” showed up recently on my Facebook feed, and though I instantly assumed it was something I wanted nothing to do with — and it is still something I will not likely ever find time to read in its entirety — it’s not an entirely unenjoyable ride. I don’t always understand what the guy’s beefs are (beyond “I disagree with this particular assessment of this particular album/artist”) but his bullshit radar for silly turns of phrase is pretty good, and I did laugh at some of the bits he quotes (and there’s some value in just having all these disparate RS reviews hanging together in one venue; I just clicked around randomly). Truth is, I should probably be grateful right now that I was never hired to write record reviews for Rolling Stone — their loss, my gain, I suppose. (I do wish I could search the database by writer. And I did spot at least one gaffe: Arion Berger is a she, not a he. Anyway.)
At his excellent blog, Can’t Explain, Jeff Pike assembles a small road crew to re-evaluate Neil Young’s 1979 Pazz & Jop-winning LP, Rust Never Sleeps. Jeff, Phil Dellio, Steven Rubio, Jack Thompson, and yours truly all pipe in, with reactions which, while positive overall, are surprisingly varied. The one perhaps not-so-surprising common denominator, mentioned at least once by everyone, is punk. (My original impulse, in fact, was to put Rust on a scale, and simply measure its then-and-current worth against other late ’70s punk-inspired moves by pre-punk people, i.e., Some Girls, Street Hassle, “Who Are You,” The Bride Stripped Bare, et al.) There’s some great stuff in all this. Thanks to Jeff for letting me play along.
“ABC were striking out where a lot of other pop (but not all of it) was too timid to follow.
“I emphasise that ‘but not all of it’ because by early 1982 it was palpably evident that a great deal of pop was striking out. Records like ‘Party Fears Two’ and ‘Ghosts’ were redefining what could be achieved with pop music on a near-weekly basis. The charts, hitherto on the verge of moribund, became exciting again. All due respect to Hendrix and Zeppelin but I can attest first-hand that in the first half of 1982 — the second half was a different matter, but we’ll get to that soon enough – there was no time to listen to the old stuff when so much colourful and innovative new music was demanding my attention.”
– Marcello Carlin wrote 15,000 words on ABC’s The Lexicon of Love. Maybe the only record review I’ve come across which ends with an Acknowledgements section (if you read it, you’ll understand why). I certainly share his feelings about the astonishing inventiveness of the early ’80s, though for me, living in North America (and not in a major centre like Toronto), almost none of that excitement was transmitted through pop radio. It was all through magazines, and (at least until I discovered the Voice) mostly British ones. An Anglophile to the core (a Canadian affliction, what can I say?), I imagined the UK to be this fantastically exciting place where one would turn on the radio and hear records by the Associates and Linx and Laurie Anderson. I’ve learned from reading Marcello over the years that this was in fact not a fiction, or anyway, not entirely so.
Music isn’t a science — it breathes and moves, it adjusts to its surroundings. We know that everyone wants to figure this out as quickly as possible, but that’s not the way to take in music, and an album release like this one just shows more clearly than ever how unhealthy the state of music really is. We are literally trying to review albums — no, album leaks — within 24 hours. When it’s something with as much history, anticipation, and relevance as the new Daft Punk project, is that really how we want to handle it?
From DJ Pangburn’s Random Access Criticism: The Internet Pundits Are Ruining Daft Punk, Music (Motherboard)
Well, there’s no particular “way” to “take in music,” but more to the point we should probably just acknowledge the difference here between “reviewing albums” and having conversations about pop music. The Daft Punk meme was chatter-based, not writing-based. For a time, anyway (until I burned out on it, which was inevitable), I enjoyed reading the insta-reaction response to the album on Twitter and Facebook and ILX. It’s high school writ large and writ fast: you buy a new record, you argue about said record with your pals (some of whom also bought the same record) the next day in the school yard. But no, I don’t confuse this with highly literate, considered opinion about the new Daft Punk record (the reviews of which, for the most part, have been fairly boring to read — focusing on the red herring analogue angle, asking such probing questions as “is this a masterpiece”? — though perhaps the meme-overload just killed that off) (and maybe that’s the deeper underlying complaint here?).
Sometime on Friday 30 April 1982, in an apartment somewhere in New York City, Lester Bangs dies. He is found lying on the floor. He is approximately thirty-three-and-a-third years old. He had been suffering from the ‘flu and had been taking Darvon and NyQuil. It was suggested that his immune system was shot due to an over-zealous cleaning-up of his own body following a lifetime of alcohol and speed abuse. But he was taking more than the recommended dose of both these remedies, and in addition had taken quite a bit of valium. There is a record spinning on his stereo, the needle locked in the run-out groove. The record was Dare by the Human League. It has not been specified which side he had been listening to, or what song he was hearing at the point where he may have realised that life was sliding away from him. No one could know; he left no notes, not having planned to die.
I don’t know what he would have made or thought of it…
– Marcello Carlin, reviewing Human League’s Dare on his #1 UK albums blog, brings Lester Bangs, Margaret Thatcher, and Heaven 17 to the table also. (Dare is not a record I continue to play often, but it’s probably one of the half dozen records about which I can accurately say that my initial listen to it was utterly transformative, in that it felt like a break from everything I’d listened to in my life up until then. It wasn’t, of course — nothing ever is — but initially, one Saturday evening in my basement bedroom, it felt anomalous.)
Geeta Dayal, Simon Reynolds, and Carl Wilson discuss the new Bowie album on the CBC. (Can’t access this now, will have to listen later. And in other important news, I’m going to break down and give the Bowie album a listen as well.)
Steven Ward, in this brief comments thread, conveyed disappointment with Simon Reynolds for not (or anyway, for barely) mentioning music in his NYT Bowie review. I concur that it’s a problem because one simple question is never answered for me, which is why are people getting excited (faux-excited?) about this particular Bowie record now? Today, in Burning Ambulance, Phil Freeman reviews The Next Day, and fair to say, I think, that his piece exists at a 180-degree remove from Reynolds’s. That is to say, Freeman’s review is entirely, I mean literally almost first sentence to last, about what is happening in the music — the way it sounds, what various players are doing, etc. — with zero concern for the Bowie context, and indeed, little concern for any context outside of the music itself (I say “little,” because the review reads like an argument of sorts, for “feat[s] of instrumental interaction,” and Freeman does draw some comparisons to other musicians).
Freeman’s review never mentions clothes or hair. Reynolds’s review says nothing about how the drums are mixed. I find both approaches wholly unsatisfying, to be honest, though I’m hesitant to say that either approach couldn’t work. I’m curious how other people feel about all this; it’s a pretty fundamental argument, one that’s been taking place in music criticism for a very long time, possibly forever. As a reader — or a writer — do you gravitate towards one approach or the other?
Anyone who’s heard Womack and Womack’s ‘Teardrops’ will know that being a banging disco floorfiller is absolutely no guarantee of it not being one of the saddest songs in the world. And not every song on an album has to be heartbroken for it to be heartbreaking, of course.
– Hazel Robinson reviews Tegan and Sara‘s Heartthrob
But sometimes you get the real thing, as with James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. Like Chinese Democracy and Vineland, Finnegans Wake took 17 years, as everybody wondered how Joyce could follow a masterpiece like Ulysses. The Wake inspired a book of critical essays before it even came out, based on the “Work in Progress” fragments he published in lit mags. But when the Wake arrived, the long wait was forgotten, because it turned out to be another masterpiece that gave everyone more interesting problems. And now MBV is the new My Bloody Valentine masterpiece, ever since it arrived on February 2nd, which happens to be the same date Joyce published Ulysses in 1922, on his birthday. He was hoping to release Finnegans Wake on February 2nd as well, but it took him a few more months. (Joyce and Shields are Irish guys. Ever wait for an Irish guy to show up on time? Don’t.)
– Rob Sheffield, “My Hundredth Listen to the New My Bloody Valentine Album: Even Better Than the First” (Rolling Stone)
Sheffield is on the case…
Anthony Easton: At first I was sad that the production obscured her voice, but it’s in the same sub-genre as KLF and Tammy or Pet Shop Boys and Dusty, and those are some of my favourite things. It is less isolating than those examples, but incredibly intimate, the same otherness of Scott Walker, and perhaps the same rejection of pop history, but with the artifice stripped instead of compiled.
[10]
New Petula Clark single (! — if he wasn’t already dead, I’d say tell Glenn Gould the news) reviewed in the Singles Jukebox. It’s nice sometimes to read about a 10 out of 10 that a) still actually reads like a fairly measured critique; and b) makes me want to hear the thing ASAP. (The KLF/Tammy and Pet Shop Boys/Dusty analogy is the obvious hook for me, though I’d add Kon-Kan/Lynn Anderson to the mix also.)
“‘Who’s Crying Now,’ the hit single off Journey’s hit LP, isn’t super hip, super deep or even real, real hooky. But it does sound good. What I’m talking about is the way the song’s soft, soapy bass redeems its soft, dopey sentiment by diving beneath tiny fillips of acoustic guitar and bubbling up around a dream-sized dollop of fat harmonies. Every shimmery cymbal tick pays tribute to the state of modern engineering. Same goes for the sting in Neal Schon’s electric-guitar solo, which is what finally drives the tune up, out and home.
“Would that one could say the same for the rest of the record…”
– Deborah Frost reviews Journey’s Escape, Rolling Stone, 1981
An M.I.A. collage I found following the release of 2010’s Maya (more colloquially known as /\/\ /\ Y /). Not as good, mind you, as Rich Juzwiak’s perfect word-collage of the same, the sort of review which, by its very being, resists anthologization (good).
RockCritics.com 